10/13 (45 seconds later):

I truly can't believe this I opened spotify to skip to the next song on my background playlist and it has this little box at the bottom that says "Sent by [REDACTED]" with a picture of [REDACTED]???? Bc apparently years ago we sent the song to each other??? emotional assassination by spotify

10/13:

I'm very emo today bc I'm thinking of going to Storm King tomorrow. Last time I went was last fall but with [redacted]. I rode 100 miles yesterday on the bike and along the way I saw so many different animals as roadkill. I'm also reading 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline' by Andreas Malm would recommend.

10:11:

Amtrak Adirondacker northbound, 7:15 AM on a cool morning. Probably closest I’ve come to missing the train (underrated how long the bike takes to set up for travel). Unbroken Chain by Grateful Dead playing in the AirPods. A few weeks ago I ended up mansplaining the ‘thing’ behind the Dead that makes them America’s most important rock band. What’s America’s most important band of the 21st century? Stereogum/Pitchfork would end up saying The Strokes but I just don’t see that at all to be fair. Pavement probably did more for American music than Strokes and I’d argue the first few Weezer albums definitiely did. Don’t need a band full of parents with wikipedia articles (wow I didn’t mean to end up this negative on the Strokes as the first album was at once point my all time favorite to the [point where an ex got me a copy of the record with our first pic together as the album sleeve). Tough for that record as when we broke up I didn’t want to keep the liner so that one is BEAT

I’ve also been feeling so lost the last few weeks since [redacted] but I’m wondering if part of this is a dead reckoning with past self. I guess I can feel proud of some new level of self recognition - like in the past if I had a night like I did Thursday (out too late, bit of other non beer substances, spent more money than I’d ideally like BUT had a lovely time with the people and didn’t make a fool of myself/do anything hyper destructive [love that my scale is based on a negative avoidance rather than aspirational]), I’d be either not reflecting at all or spiraling. Nobody got hurt, the budget can allow for this (budget doc as a tool??), I’ve got some lovely memos.

It’s actually insane the more I think about it on the Columbus Day bit vs indigenous people’s day. Not to be a white guy that read ‘Bury My Heart at Wounded Kneeee’ and lost his head off of it but oh man how do we not have some modicum of self reflection coming from it. We’ve consistently massacred a people who gave us a more fair share than we deserve, lied at every stage of the way, and used the media/state apparatus/military that we’ve venerated (Sheridan, Sherman) to do it in the service of what? Mining and capital rights to decimate a land? Where are we for it? The locust swarms of bison are gone, the great forests and fields that were managed for so long are missing. And then our penance is to write reductionist moral tales of the idyllic Indians and either A) don’t acknowledge that these are real people not some Kaw-Liga in the cigar store door and as such will do bad things as well or B)Don’t acknowledge that when rare reverses of fortune happen and penance is finally paid that this is what you expect

10/1:

I leave for London on Sunday and I'm scared that the side of me which doesn't respect myself will reappear. I have these visions of morning runs and British pastries and chilled air and I don't know if I'll suceed....am I setting myself up for failure?

9/23:

Being social at work and immediately regretting it. Only 33 years to go!

9/22:

Weird last few days I feel like I've been in a sun-soaked haze

9/18:

Feeling it again. The rush of the F train going by and realizing that could have been for me. Unburdening myself on others does nothing it just raises the mark of the beast. It’s the Goya image of the ink etched demons of nightmares flying off the sleeping writer, the antediluvian sons of Cain in some old growth forest waiting to smash me to pieces. I don’t even know that there’s a bar strong enough to hold the rope.

9/17:

In the reading room at the New York public library; I read recently a great point on “why are we working from coffee shops when libraries exist”. This place rips and if I could ever figure out how to upload a .jpg on this site I’d have a companion image (@Alex plz fix, thx)

Its not quiet spitting rain but I can’t necessarily think of a better phrase - maybe spittling?? That sounds so much worse lol

My th***pist keeps pushing me to “play snakes” as in be open about the worst thing you’ve ever done. Did that the other day and it wasn’t terrible!! Maybe bc the other person was very nice and non-judgmental but in my head I picture some bearded old testament god smelling of fire and brimstone ready to smite me with an oversized thunderbolt for my sins.

9/15:

Genuinely incredibly excited to read ‘The Buffalo Hunter Hunter’ by Stephen Graham Jones.

Definition of lovely weekend in which I:

-Ate a personal pan key lime pie

-Had a lovely apricot pastry

-Ended a situationship

-went to a bike flea market

-Hit a walk off home run in softball

-Biked around and picked up a new film camera

-saw a concert where I didn’t know more than one song and had a not horrible time

-ran a 10M race and got to SPRINT downhill at the end

-Talked to my grandma on the phone

-took an edible and walked around the botanical gardens

9/11

Late afternoon

Overcaffeinated. Love sitting around coffee shop back patios leaned back with crossed legs it makes me feel like Pacino in Serpico in his backyard. In an absolutely useless meeting at the moment and slowly realizing I don’t give a fuck about my job. Problem is I’m overpaid for my actual abilities and yet still feel underpaid for living in New York.

They’ve said AI 15 times in the last 2 minutes “we’ve got all these little AI tools”.

~~~~

Evening

Subway home from basketball. I’m tired and sad and miserable and I don’t know why. I played okay sometimes and horrifically other times. i never shut up when I’m playing bc I’m worried that ppl judge how poorly I play and think that I’m a worse person for it. getting my ass kicked by bob dylan’s maybe bastard son is disheartening! Writing these weird stream of consciousness bits where I’m overly self critical is a bit cathartic sometimes but still I don’t know if I come out the worse for wear on the other side for having let it out (there’s value in the old Irish approach of burying it deep down inside and never mentioning it again). i might be lightly losing my mind a little, on a 3rd date the other day I told the person something I’ve never told anyone else in my life which was interesting. idk if I’d recommend that.

Took a few days off from weed (all of 3) and not sure if me having an edible tonight is self care or a further turn down a dark road

9/9

Anyways what’s up Flounder. I truly don’t know my way around here so apologies in advance for some crazy faux pas I’m sure I’m completing (incl. not knowing how to respond to other ppl).

On another elevated train. I keep going home around lunchtime to leave the office or for some imagined errand & I wonder why I keep intentionally putting myself into dour moods. I like this form of writing where I do no editing and just keep typing basically as fast as possible. Leads to some weird typos that I sure I won’t catch in post. I’m going to keep trying to pull my laptop out on the subway and just type what I see so we’ll see the output. My jaw is always clenched now.

Its always strange to me how we got about one decade of public works projects in this whole country and then slammed that door shut bc it smelled of communism and that’s why all our works look art deco. Sliding doors of history moments - Henry Wallace being replaced as VP in 1944, letting a man’s cousin do the first announcement of election results in Florida in 2000, a little better aim in a field in Butler PA.

Does anyone have any experience writing research papers/books? There’s this niche labor moment in the town over from me that if I had any investigative authorial skills whatsoever I’d be able to dig into and turn into some meaty tale about environmental destruction, the end of mass labor in America, and public health crises.

Basically this giant paper mill in upstate NY (like proper upstate north of Albany) spent a century destroying all the old growth forests in the Adirondacks (they used to be so old growth that there was a native population of bison up there [digression within the digression that this is where the Buffalo Bills get some of their lineage from] because of how spread apart the trees are, and even now the oldest of forests are still scrubby castoffs of something older and bigger). To that end, its always insane when walking in what feels like barely trod woods and coming across stone wall remnants, a reminder that there’s no such thing as untouched nature (and I guess this is inherent in the name - where are the wolves?).

After clogging the rivers with so many logs you could walk across it, they started reducing salaries at the ned of the 90s when they realized that unsurprisingly you can’t log the same trees isn’t forever. The union went on strike, the PE backed company called in scabs and broke the union’s back, and now there’s little to no union representation in “hometown USA” and instead a cancer rate in the neighborhoods under the smoky plume 2-3x the national average. And now nobody talks about it! It took my mom mentioning it off the cuff once to even know all this happened. And all of this a few miles away from where GE poured so many PCBs into the Hudson River that a river that until very recently (like in my parents’ adult lifetime) had dolphins swimming up to Albany is too poisonous to eat more than 1 fish from per month if you’re an adult male with no underlying health issues, and 0 fish per year if you’re a pregnant person.

How do we do that to ourselves and let these corporations get away with it just because they put their name on a little league team? Why is the myth of Jack Welch and ruthless administration so palatable to so many people? Does the boot taste that good?

What do we owe to people we barely know? There’s so many things in past relationships that I’m ashamed of, do I owe future relationships a bared soul version of “here’s the worst thing I’ve ever done”? I’m sitting here waiting for some form of perdition, for some punishment that may or may not come. Do I just have to rip out every mention of a past version of me and pretend it never existed? Do I have to bare witness to every mistake I’ve made played at 1.5x speed? Feedback culture.

I’m trying to try some form of sobriety and idk what that is but to be fair between an upcoming marathon and going way over budget and hating the version of myself when I drink if I can’t read the writing on the wall what’s it all about. Can’t explain it all away by saying by dad used to beat my brother and I!

Is there a way to write without worrying that it’s not my tone? That this is all just some simulacrum of a dog-eared hand me down copy of some better author? I don’t know that the world needs another young man who once read Hemingway or Bolano or Camus or to put in dark bold lettering what could be knockoff fan fiction. Maybe I’ll never be a better writer than I was as a lonely 17 year old watching Sid Meier’s Civ 5 simulation games and describing some doomed pixels charging across a hexagonal steppe plain towards some pre-ordained destruction of 1s and 0s.

9/8

I’m writing this from an express train en route from Stamford CT to NYC. The seats have a 70s red that they don’t make anymore and the speckled red on the floor is a slightly different shade. I was in Providence for a wedding of my senior year college roommate who met his fiancee on campus and would then get married at a chapel there. I don’t think I’m a very good writer. In fact, I often talk down on myself, and spent most of the service feeling a level of catholic guilt unheard of since Scorcese started making movies. I spent the weekend drinking too much red wine, spilling it on every article of clothing I have, and generally leaving operating as a series of dominos. I know I need to drink less, or maybe not at all, and I know the steps to do it are right in front of me but I refuse to take the first step (or maybe more relevantly I refuse to commit to the steps after the first show of bravado).

I’ve been running end to end since my breakup this year, and have done basically zero self reflection. We’re alongside an empty train now running spike for spike with them and the emblazoned 9333 on it stares back at me. I wish I wrote more.

On the car ride back, I rode with a friend who for some reason or another I’ve never allowed myself to open up to. He’s incredibly charismatic (that’s how he’d describe himself and to be fair, how I would as well), but I think I’ve let outside reviews by angry young men color my view on him.

Guilt is my default emotion, always feeling as though I’m about to wrong someone. Perhaps its because I feel I need to be some imagined perfect version of myself at all time, or this same angry young men who talk about my friend behind his back may talk the same way about me. The angry young men like me in hour increments, and then I flee, feeling like Stanczyk.

Stone walls and steel bars and love on my mind. It’s all a stream of consciousness, everything I do. Would my brain be less manic if I divorced myself from mind altering substances? Why did I need a late edible drink Thursday night? Why am I obsessed with an excel based budget document? I feel as though I must hold myself to account (or be held against it).

As part of my ride back, I discussed relationship trauma, I sometimes feel guilty about work that I haven’t done on myself and really, I haven’t done that much work at alllllll. I still drink heavily, I still have porn brain thoughts, I’m aware these things exist and are part of me, but I don’t necessarily act on them. I always just attack via shame. Occasionally, the speakers on these old trains make a synth sound that could best be described ass a spurt o bubbles from a deep sea spout. We’re passing Woodlawn now. In thinking about relationship healing, my friend mentioned that for him, it was a matter of prioritization. I don’t feel very in touch with myself sometimes, I always worry that I’m only surface level at best - and I often feel adrift about what to prioritize.

I say I want the other person to feel pleasure, which may be true in certain ways, but do I really just want to feel like I’m bringing value? I want to be wanted which is how I end up in parasocial relationships where I’m always fleeing.